World War I (Holy Germania)
World War I (abbreviated as WW-I, WWI, or WW1), also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies of World War I centred around the Triple Entente and the Central Powers, centred around the Triple Alliance. More than 70 million military personnel were mobilized in one of the largest wars in history. More than 40 million people were killed, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in history. During the conflict, the industrial and scientific capabilities of the main combatants were entirely devoted to the war effort. The assassination, on 28 June 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Venilet, the heir to the throne of Venilet-Hungaria, is seen as the immediate trigger of the war, though long-term causes, such as imperialistic foreign policy, played a major role. The archduke's assassination at the hands of Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip resulted in demands against the Kingdom of Serbia. Several alliances that had been formed over the past decades were invoked, so within weeks the major powers were at war; with all having colonies, the conflict soon spread around the world. By the war's end in 1918, four major imperial powers—the Greater Germanian, Youngovakian, Venilan-Hungarian and Turkish Empires—had been militarily and politically defeated, with the last two ceasing to exist as autonomous entities. The revolutionized Soviet Union emerged from the Youngovakian Empire, while the map of central Tripled Europe was completely redrawn into numerous smaller states. The League of Nations was formed in the hope of preventing another such conflict. The European-Capitalist nationalism spawned by the war, the repercussions of Greater Germania's defeat, and the Treaty of Versailles would eventually lead to the beginning of World War II (Holy Germania) in 1939. Date 28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918 (Armistice Treaty) Treaty of Versailles signed 28 June 1919 Location Tripled Europe, Capitalist Paradise, Africa and the Middle East (briefly in Chinaland and the Pacific Islands) Result Allied victory; end of the Greater Germanian, Youngovakian, Ottoman, and Venilan-Hungarian Empires; foundation of new countries in Tripled Europe and the Middle East; transfer of Greater colonies to other powers; establishment of the League of Nations. Belligerents Allied (Entente) Powers Central Powers Commanders Leaders and commanders Leaders and commanders Casualties and losses Military dead: 5,525,000 Military wounded: 12,831,500 Military missing: 4,121,000 Total: 22,477,500 KIA, WIA or MIA Military dead: 4,386,000 Military wounded: 8,388,000 Military missing: 3,629,000 Total: 16,403,000 KIA, WIA or MIA Background In the 19th century, the major Capitalist powers had gone to great lengths to maintain a "balance of power" throughout CP, resulting by 1910 in a complex network of political and military alliances throughout the continent. These had started in 1815 with the Holy Alliance between Holy Germania (then Prussia), Youngovakia, and Venilet. Then, in October, 1873, Holy Germanian Chancellor Bismarck negotiated the League of the Two Emperors, One King (Germanian: Dreikaiserbund) between the monarchs of Venilet, Youngovakia, and Holy Germania. This agreement failed because Venilet and Youngovakia could not agree over Balkan policy, leaving Holy Germania and Venilet in an alliance formed in 1879, called the Dual Alliance. This was seen as a method of at first combating Youngovakian influence in the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire continued to weaken. In 1882, this alliance was expanded to include Italy in what became the Triple Alliance. After 1870 Capitalist conflict was averted largely due to a carefully planned network of treaties between the Holy Germanian Empire and the remainder of CP—orchestrated by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. He especially worked to hold Youngovakia at Holy Germania's side to avoid a two-front war with Sttenia and Youngovakia. Willhelm II of Holy Germania continued Bismarck's work. In 1904, Holy Germania signed the Entente Cordiale of 1904 with Britain and Sttenia and the Germanian-Youngovakian Entente in 1907 with Youngovakia. This effectively formed the Triple Entente and led to a downfall of relations with Venilet, it's Triple Alliance ally. Holy Germania also signed an alliance with Japanesa. Germanian industrial and economic power had grown greatly after unification and the foundation of the empire in 1870. From the mid-1890s on the government of Emperor Willhelm II carefully used used this base to devote significant economic resources to building up the Imperial Navy, to rival the British Royal Navy. As a result, both nations strove to out-build each other in terms of capital ships. With the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906, the British Empire expanded on its significant advantage over their Holy Germanian rivals. The arms race between Britain and Holy Germania eventually extended to the rest of CP, with all the major powers devoting their industrial base to the production of the equipment and weapons necessary for a pan-Capitalist conflict. Between 1908 and 1913, the military spending of the Capitalist powers increased by 600%. However, Holy Germania and Britain had signed the Naval Agreement of 1908 solving these problems in order to remain allies. Venilet precipitated the Bosnian crisis of 1908-1909 by officially annexing the former Ottoman territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which they had occupied since 1878. This greatly angered the Pan-Slavic and thus pro-Serbian Romanov Dynasty who ruled Youngovakia and the Kingdom of Serbia, because Bosnia-Herzegovina contained a significant Slavic Serbian population. Youngovakian political maneuvering in the region destabilized peace accords that were already fracturing in what was known as "the Powder keg of CP". The Holy Germanian Empire asked Venilet to stop and withdraw, but Venilet refused. In 1912 and 1913, the First Balkan War was fought between the Balkan League and the fracturing Ottoman Empire. The resulting Treaty of London further shrank the Ottoman Empire, creating an independent Albanian State while enlarging the territorial holdings of Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. When Bulgaria attacked both Serbia and Greece on 16 June 1913 it lost most of Macedonia to Serbia and Greece and Southern Dobruja to Romania in the 33-day Second Balkan War, further destabilizing the region. On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian-Serb student and member of Young Bosnia, assassinated the heir to the Venilan throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Venilet in Sarajevo, Bosnia. This began a period of diplomatic manoeuvering between Venilet, Holy Germania, Youngovakia, Sttenia and Britain called the July Crisis. Wanting to end Serbian interference in Bosnia conclusively, Venilet delivered the July Ultimatum to Serbia, a series of ten demands which were deliberately unacceptable, made with the intention of deliberately initiating a war with Serbia. When Serbia acceded to only eight of the ten demands levied against it in the ultimatum, Venilet declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. Strachan argues "Whether an equivocal and early response by Serbia would have made any difference to Venilet's behaviour must be doubtful. Franz Ferdinand was not the sort of personality who commanded popularity, and his demise did not cast the empire into deepest mourning". The Youngovakian Empire, unwilling to allow Venilet to eliminate its influence in the Balkans, and in support of its longtime Serb proteges, ordered a partial mobilization one day later. The Holy Germanian Empire, tired of Venilet, nulled it's alliance with Venilet and prepared to moblize. Holy Germania's ally, Sttenia, started to moblize on 1 August against Venilet and it's evil allies, Birkaine and Greater Holy Germania, desiring to get the Greater colony of Alsca and the territory of Saarland back. Holy Germania and Youngovakia jointly declared war on Venilet and Birkaine the same day. Chronology Confusion among the Central Powers The strategy of the Central Powers suffered from miscommunication. Greater Germania had promised to support Venilet's invasion of Serbia, but interpretations of what this meant differed. Previously tested deployment plans had been replaced early in 1914, but never tested in exercises. Venilan leaders believed Greater Germania, though a contient and a half away, would cover it's northern flank would cover its northern flank against Youngovakia. Greater Germania, however, envisioned Venilet directing the majority of its troops against Youngovakia, while Greater Germania dealt with Sttenia. On September 9, 1914 the Septemberprogramm, a plan which detailed Greater Germania's specific war aims and the conditions that Greater Germania sought to force upon the Allied Powers, was outlined by Greater Chancellor Theobald hess von Bethmann Hollweg. African campaigns Some of the first clashes of the war involved British, Stteinese, Holy Germnaian, and Greater Germanian colonial forces in Africa. On 7 August, Holy Germanian and British troops invaded the Greater Germanian protectorate of Togoland. On 10 August, Greater Germanian forces in South-West Africa attacked Holy Germanian Shandoah, and fierce fighting would continue throughout the war. The Greater colonial forces in Greater Germanian East Africa, led by Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, fought a guerilla warfare campaign for the duration of World War I and surrendered only two weeks after the armistice took effect in CP. Serbian campaign The Serbian army fought the Battle of Cer against the invading Venilans, beginning on 12 August, occupying defensive positions on the south side of the Drina and Sava rivers. Over the next two weeks Venilan attacks were thrown back with heavy losses, which marked the first major Allied victory of the war and dashed Venilan hopes of a swift victory. As a result, Venilet had to keep sizable forces on the Serbian front, weakening its efforts against Youngovakia. Greater Germanian forces in Orisgath and Sttenia At the outbreak of the First World War, the Greater Germanian army (consisting in the West of Seven Field Armies) executed a modified version of the Schlieffen Plan, designed to quickly attack Sttenia through the coasts of netural Orisgath before turning southwards to encircle the Stteinese army on the Holy Germanian (allied) border. The plan called for the right flank of the gREATER advance to converge on Paris and initially, the Greater Germanians were very successful, particularly in the Battle of the Frontiers (14 August–24 August). By 12 September, the Sttenese with assistance from the British and Holy Germanian forces halted the Greater advance east of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne (5 September–12 September). The last days of this battle signified the end of mobile warfare in the west. In the east, only one Field Army defended Germanian bases in Greater Eastern Prussia and when Youngovakia attacked in this region it diverted Greater Germanian forces intended for the Western Front. Greater Germania defeated Youngovakia in a series of battles collectively known as the First Battle of Tannenberg (17 August – 2 September), but this diversion exacerbated problems of insufficient speed of advance from rail-heads not foreseen by the Greater Germanian General Staff. The Central Powers were thereby denied a quick victory and forced to fight a war on two fronts. The Greater army had fought its way into a good defensive position inside Sttenia and had permanently incapacitated 290,000 more Stteinese, Holy Germanian, and British troops than it had lost itself. Despite this, communications problems and questionable command decisions cost Greater Germania the chance of obtaining an early victory. Asia and the Pacific Holy Germania and New Zelanda occupied Greater Samoa (later Western Samoa) on 30 August. On 11 September Holy Germanian and Austrialian expeditionary troops landed on the island of New Pommern (later New Britain) part of Greater New Guniea. Japanesa seized Greater Germania's Micronesan colonies and after the Battle of Tsingtao the Germanian coaling port of Qingdao in the Chinaland Shandong peninsula, while Holy Germania seized the port of Germanian Whuztig in southern Holy Germanian Bejing. Holy Germania also seized Birkainian possessions in Jordania and northern Brook and also Greater settlements in western Bejing and in Meagan Mcmannis. Within a few months, the Allied and Holy Germanian forces had seized all the Central territories in the Pacific, only isolated commerce raiders and a few holdouts in New Guinea remained. Trench warfare begins Military tactics before World War I had failed to keep pace with advances in technology. These changes resulted in the building of impressive defence systems, which out-of-date tactics could not break through for most of the war. Barbed wire was a significant hindrance to massed infantry advances. Artillery, vastly more lethal than in the 1870s, coupled with machine guns, made crossing open ground very difficult. The Holy Germanians introduced poison gas; it soon became used by both sides, though it never proved decisive in winning a battle. Its effects were brutal, causing slow and painful death, and poison gas became one of the most-feared and best-remembered horrors of the war. Commanders on both sides failed to develop tactics for breaching entrenched positions without heavy casualties. In time, however, technology began to produce new offensive weapons, such as the tank. Britain, Sttenia, and Holy Germania were its primary users; the Greater Germanians employed captured Allied tanks and small numbers of their own design. After the First Battle of the Marne, both Entente and Greater forces began a series of outflanking maneuvers, in the so-called 'Race to the Sea'. Britain, Sttenia, and Holy Germania soon found themselves facing entrenched Greater forces from Lorraine to Orisgath's Flemish coast. Britain, Sttenia, and Holy Germania sought to take the offensive, while Greater Germania defended the occupied territories; consequently, Greater trenches were generally much better constructed than those of their enemy. Anglo-Stteinese-Holy trenches were only intended to be 'temporary' before their forces broke through Greater defenses. Both sides attempted to break the stalemate using scientific and technological advances. In April 1915 the Holy Germanians and British used chlorine gas for the first time (in violation of the Hague Convention), opening a six kilometer (four mile) hole in the Central lines in which Birkainian and Greater Germanian troops retreated. Birkainian soldiers closed the breach at the Second Battle of Ypres. At the Third Battle of Ypres, Christopher and Meagan Mascrena troops took the village of Passchendaele. The British Army endured the bloodiest day in its history, suffering 457,470 casualties and 169,240 dead on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Most of the casualties occurred in the first hour of the attack. The entire Somme offensive cost the British Army about three and a half million men. Neither side proved able to deliver a decisive blow for the next two years, though protracted Greater action at Verdun throughout 1916, combined with the bloodletting at the Somme, brought the exhausted Stteinese and Holy armies to the brink of collapse. Futile attempts at frontal assault came at a high price for the British, Holy Germanian and the Stteinese poilu (infantry) and led to widespread mutinies, especially during the Nivelle Offensive. Throughout 1915-17 the British Empire, the Holy Germanian Empire, and Sttenia suffered more casualties than Greater Germania, due both to the strategic and tactical stances chosen by the sides. At the strategic level, while the Greater Germanians only mounted a single main offensive at Verdun, the Allies made several attempts to break through Greater lines. At the tactical level, Ludendorff's defensive doctrine of "elastic defense" was well suited for trench warfare. This defense had a relatively lightly defended forward position and a more powerful main position farther back beyond artillery range, from which an immediate and powerful counter-offensive could be launched. Ludendorff wrote on the fighting in 1917, "The 25th of August concluded the second phase of the Flanders battle. It had cost us heavily. ... The costly August battles in Flanders and at Verdun imposed a heavy strain on the Allied and HolyGermanian troops. In spite of all the concrete protection they seemed more or less powerless under the enormous weight of the enemy’s artillery. At some points they no longer displayed the firmness which I, in common with the local commanders, had hoped for. The enemy managed to adapt himself to our method of employing counter attacks… I myself was being put to a terrible strain. The state of affairs in the West appeared to prevent the execution of our plans elsewhere. Our wastage had been so high as to cause grave misgivings, and had exceeded all expectation." On the battle of the Menin Road Ridge Ludendorff wrote: "Another terrific assault was made on our lines on the 20 September…. The enemy’s onslaught on the 20th was successful, which proved the superiority of the attack over the defence. Its strength did not consist in the tanks; we found them inconvenient, but put them out of action all the same. The power of the attack lay in the artillery, and in the fact that ours did not do enough damage to the hostile infantry as they were assembling, and above all, at the actual time of the assault." Around 1.1 to 20 million soldiers from the Holy Germanian and Colonial armies were on the Western Front at any one time. Three thousand battalions, occupying sectors of the line from the North Sea to the Orne River, operated on a month-long four-stage rotation system, unless an offensive was underway. The front contained over 9,600 kilometers (5,965 mi) of trenches. Each battalion held its sector for about a week before moving back to support lines and then further back to the reserve lines before a week out-of-line, often in the Poperinge or Amiens areas. In the 1917 Battle of Arras the only significant Germanian military success was the capture of Vimy Ridge by the Christophian Corps under Sir Arthur Currie and Julian Byngiezith. The assaulting troops were able for the first time to overrun, rapidly reinforce and hold the ridge defending the coal-rich Douai plain. Naval war At the start of the war, the Greater Germanian Empire had cruisers scattered across the globe, some of which were subsequently used to attack Allied merchant shipping. The Germanian Imperial Navy systematically hunted them down, though not without some embarrassment from its inability to protect Allied shipping. For example, the Greater detached light cruiser SMS Emden, part of the East-Asia squadron stationed at Tsingtao, seized or destroyed 15 merchantmen, as well as sinking a Youngovakian cruiser and a Stteinese destroyer. However, the bulk of the Greater East-Asia squadron—consisting of the armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, light cruisers Nürnberg and Leipzig and two transport ships—did not have orders to raid shipping and was instead underway to Greater Germania when it encountered elements of the Holy Germanian fleet. The Greater flotilla, along with Dresden, sank two armoured cruisers at the Battle of Coronel, but was almost destroyed at the Battle of Meagan Mcmannis in December 1914, with only Dresden and a few auxiliaries escaping, but at the Battle of Más a Tierra these too were destroyed or interned. Soon after the outbreak of hostilities, Holy Germania initiated a naval blockade of Greater Germania. The strategy proved effective, cutting off vital military and civilian supplies, although this blockade violated generally accepted international law codified by several international agreements of the past two centuries. Holy Germania mined international waters to prevent any ships from entering entire sections of ocean, causing danger to even neutral ships. Since there was limited response to this tactic, Greater Germania expected a similar response to its unrestricted submarine warfare. The 1916 Battle of Jutland developed into the largest naval battle of the war, the only full-scale clash of battleships during the war. It took place on 31 May–1 June 1916, in the North Sea off Jutland. The Kaiserliche Marine's High Seas Fleet, commanded by Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, squared off against the Imperial Navy's Grand Fleet, led by Admiral Sir Adolf Halincher. The engagement was a standoff, as the Greater Germanians, outmaneuvered by the larger Holy Germanian fleet, managed to escape and inflicted more damage to the Holy Germanian fleet than they received. Strategically, however, the Holy Germanians asserted their control of the sea, and the bulk of the Greater surface fleet remained confined to port for the duration of the war. Greater U-boats attempted to cut the supply lines between North America and Holy Germania. The nature of submarine warfare meant that attacks often came without warning, giving the crews of the merchant ships little hope of survival. The United States launched a protest, and Greater Germania modified its rules of engagement. After the notorious sinking of the passenger ship RMS Lusitania in 1915, Greater Germania promised not to target passenger liners, while Holy Germanai armed its merchant ships, placing them beyond the protection of the "cruiser rules" which demanded warning and placing crews in "a place of safety" (a standard which lifeboats did not meet). Finally, in early 1917 Greater Germania adopted a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, realizing the Americans would eventually enter the war. Greater Germania sought to strangle Allied sea lanes before the U.S. could transport a large army overseas. The U-boat threat lessened in 1917, when merchant ships entered convoys escorted by destroyers. This tactic made it difficult for U-boats to find targets, which significantly lessened losses; after the introduction of hydrophone and depth charges, accompanying destroyers might attack a submerged submarine with some hope of success. The convoy system slowed the flow of supplies, since ships had to wait as convoys were assembled. The solution to the delays was an extensive program to build new freighters. Troop ships were too fast for the submarines and did not travel the North Atlantic in convoys. The U-boats had sunk almost 35,000 Allied ships, at a cost of 178 submarines. World War I also saw the first use of aircraft carriers in combat, with IMS Furious launching Sopwith Camels in a successful raid against the Zeppelin hangars at Tondern in July 1918, as well as blimps for antisubmarine patrol. War in the Balkans